Caroline, Plates, Kenny Lienhard

The Plate in detail

Caroline, seed 280

Plate 20 of 52 · one of one

Traits

Palette: Azurite
Structure: Fold train
Event: Boudins
Faults: None
Scale: Bold
Hang: Level
Accent: Double
Heading: West-northwest, 283.6°
Speed: 5.96 cm a year

History

The past. The Caroline plate is almost all deep ocean, mostly three to five kilometres down, and the ice age barely touched it. At the glacial peak the sea stood more than 120 metres lower, so its three tiny atolls, Mapia, Sorol and Eauripik, stood as flat-topped limestone islands, and a sediment core from the Eauripik Rise shows the sea surface about 2.6 degrees cooler than it was 7,000 to 11,000 years ago. No ice ever reached these waters.

26 million years ago: The spreading ridge that built this plate's ocean floor shut down.

Sources: Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296; Dickinson 2009, GSA Today 19:4; de Garidel-Thoron et al. 2005, Nature 433:294; Crosta et al. 2022, Climate of the Past 18:1729; Lhardy et al. 2021, Climate of the Past 17:1139; Méheust et al. 2018, arktos 4:1; Reeves et al. 2013, Quaternary Science Reviews 74:97 · Gaina and Muller 2007, Earth-Science Reviews 83:177 · GPlates Portal extinct ridge compilation, Caroline Basin page, portal.gplates.org

Onchain

The file

94,124bytes, the whole work

74,112bytes of code that draws it

4,049bytes of its record, plain text

0network requests

One HTML file, to be etched to Ethereum in full: the code that draws the work (151,144 bytes before compression), this plate’s settings and its record. Nothing is fetched from anywhere else. It reads your clock and slides the view to where the plate is today.

engine sha256 a7fbc03acc0fc9ba343881bb88ddaf2b7564564d8bc9cbed16e75e47e01fb3f2

The record inside it

The plate: Caroline, a minor plate in Bird’s PB2002 model: 1,528,206 km², 100% ocean
Its motion: A pole at 75.24°S 26.28°E turning 0.543° per million years; at its centre 6.0 cm a year, heading west-northwest
What covers it: deep ocean 88%, slope and ridge 12%, ocean trench 1%, shelf sea under 1%
Its past: Its account of the last 30,000 years, with its source
Deep history: One dated events, the oldest 26 million years ago, each with its source
Its outline: 87 points, to a hundredth of a degree
Licence: CC0 1.0, no rights reserved

Read the record

Sources

The plate, its outline and its motionBird, P. (2003). An updated digital model of plate boundaries. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 4(3), 1027.
What covers it, which chose the paletteESA CCI Land Cover and Water Bodies, ETOPO 2022, Köppen-Geiger climate maps, NSIDC Sea Ice Index.

Caroline

Finished